If it had opened when scheduled in the mid 90s, it would have been worse than the LHC is today, but given that these facilities constantly update themselves, if SSC had been opened in the early 90s, by the time CERN opened, it would have certainly surpassed it in every category.

The death of the SSC was major a tragedy in the slow death of American science, began by Richard Nixon...

EDIT- it seems some people think I am saying Nixon was directly responsible for the death of the SSC. He was of course, not. You could blame clinton, or bush 1, or congress at the time, each have their own fault for its end. What i meant about Nixon was that his massive defunding of the national science foundation and various other major government-funded scientific institutions dealt a huge blow to science in America. My father in the 70s for example, had to abandon his groundbreaking thesis research on subatomic particle decay because the nixon administration cut the funding of their funding org. They had the theories, but the funding cuts delayed their confirmation for many years

I agree, which is the same reason why we don't really need one anymore. Science isn't a pissing contest, and we had an AmA last night from someone on the ATLAS team that was American. We're all looking for the same thing, and I'm happy they built it.

The only thing you can really blame is the death of The Cold War . Sadly the only way you'll see the US spend that kind of money on anything other then SSI or health care is if we get in another cold war .

He's probably referring to how Nixon curtailed spending on the NASA's Apollo program to pay for Vietnam and instead promoted the Space Shuttle. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

According to Kaku, at a 1993 congressional hearing about the soon-to-be cancelled Superconducting Supercollider in Texas, a congressman asked a physicist, "Will we find God with this machine? If so, I will vote for it."

I don't understand why it would, he was clearly expressing his understanding of the world and what he could take away from the science. He just viewed the project in a different light. He was offering to vote for it.

For a country that was formed to try and separate church from state it is more ingrained than ever.

Lived in Texas all my life and the day they canned the project a LOT of people knew it was a very bad move and not just for local economy. Someday I hope we return to intellectualism being a good thing. Now-a-days people are told it is elitism.

If we spent as much money on NASA and projects like SSC as we do on the military we might actually live in the world we dreamed about in the 1970s about the 2000+

The correct answer is maybe. While its extremely unlikely anything is possible with these machines. AKA Just say what needs to be said so that the morons in congress will give the necessary funding for science R&D.

I think it has more to do with how MUCH science we're doing now, compared to how much we used to do, in say, the 50's-90's. Also compared to what the rest of the world is doing, the US is lagging behind severely in the science department, ESPECIALLY when it comes to policy making related to science up on capitol hill.

This will come as news to scientists both in the US and around the world. Look, the US is rich, really friggin rich. Science makes up a very small part of the federal budget but that budget is so large it dwarfs the science budget of any other country. So no, the US isn't lagging behind. Other countries are finally catching. CERN is comprised of 21 European countries because, individually, the knew they couldn't do it on their own.

After Texas won the site selection, it was clear that the thing was going to be a political mess. Texas had the wrong geology, the wrong infrastructure, everything was wrong about the decision.

Now, when I see pictures of the buildings that were constructed, even they appear to be "faking it." Like it was nothing more than a state money grab for Texas. Like they knew even while building that it was never really going to be finished. Or do anything.

Have you ever been to Fermilab and the Tevatron? The main building is pretty substantial, but most of the periphery buildings have the same temporary kind of feel to them. The roof of the main test building is made of recycled 6' diameter corrugated pipe.

There just isn't a reason to build really impressive buildings when all the important stuff is in a tunnel.

If anyone gets a chance I suggest they drive around the lab. Tell security you're going to look at the buffalo and you're free to drive just about anywhere. Almost everything looks temporary and jerry rigged and is thrilling to see. You can almost feel the history and importance.

I used to live near it, not sure if they do it anymore but they used to have a science day of sorts where you could talk to scientists working there. First Sunday of the month I believe. It was awesome.

Indeed they do! My wife and I went there last year for a talk and went on a small tour. They showed us the beginning of the LINAC, a bunch of the equipment, the control room, and then we went to the top of the main building to look around and you could talk to some scientists there. They said that at certain times they can take the groups to see the actual accelerator in the tunnel but, only when it's shut down for maintenance.

This had more to do with its cancellation than anything else. I spoke to a then- congressman from CA about it and he said simply "it was too much Texas." If you are going to have a successfully supported mega-project like the SSC, you'd better make sure you spread the funding/jobs around Congress, otherwise nobody has any (political) reason to support it.

People may have recognized it was a joke and just downvoted for not being relevant to the conversation, especially in the context of /r/science. They may have actually been using downvotes for exactly their intended purpose.

I think my dad's architectural firm designed these buildings... Either that or the ones he designed were never actually built. I vaguely remember when they canceled the project... I was only 8 or 9, but I remember him being really angry for a long time. They also did some of the buildings for NASA's Mission Control in Houston. I need to ask him about this stuff.

I heard a scientist from CERN talking about the people he worked with on the BBC today using the example of Indian and Pakistani scientists working together because the target transcends their race or national religion.

The normal people from those areas are pretty damn cool. The radicals are fucking psychotics who would burn the world if given a chance, just because it disagreed with them about some delusion they had once.

These sorts of projects go down all the time for upgrades. Even the LHC will be turned off for a few months here soon. Just because it had lower power schematics in the early nineties, does not mean it would less effectual after twenty years of upgrading.

Surely we should all stop with these veiled nationalistic tendencies, just maybe it does not matter that America could have helped aid the discovery but that the discovery has been made. Shouldn't scientific development transcend theses barriers because it's humanity's knowledge that should be growing not harmful patriotism.

Maybe I'm being generous, but I didn't think the issue was a matter of national pride. Rather, I took it as a lament over the continuing decline in science funding in America. As one of the world's scientific powerhouses, America could and should be doing so much more. Alas, the money is instead being wasted on a ludicrously over-bloated military.

texas has the largest tech industry behind silicon valley, dozens of major universities, the largest seaport, nothing ever shuts down because of weather, and it's economy has consistently been one of the strongest...why exactly was texas a bad idea?

Just because nothing ever shuts down, doesn't mean we don't get tornadoes, monster hail storms, droughts, and heat waves. Anything more than a minor snow storm does shut Dallas down since we have no infrastructure to handle it.

Illinois had fermilab and better geology in which to build it (I have read that both construction would have been cheaper as well as the geology was better. Someone else says something g more technical in another comment).

It wasn't fiscal shortsightedness. The SSC was supposed to cost $4.4 billion. When it was cancelled the projected cost was $12 billion. In the financial and political climate of the time, funding two $12 billion big science projects was not possible, so it was either cancel the SSC or cancel participating in building the International Space Station.

Yes, this, exactly. I abhor the fact that when it comes to science, education and... pretty much anything else, billions = crazy amounts of money! And yet... we've been at war for over a decade which costs us like a billion+ a day. So... in one year we've spent about as much money on year 9 of the fucking "war" (which it isn't, it was an attack on another country and these days I don't have a clue wtf it is but it isn't war) as NASA has been given every year since 1958 to now combined.

This is what pisses me off, too. Imagine what we could have done, discovered, and be using to make all our lives better, if that money had been funneled instead into research and exploration! The Queen of Portugal pawned the crown jewels to fund Columbus - America won't make their gazillionaires pay one more thin dime in areas that would benefit THEM the most, by opening up new technologies and frontiers for them to exploit first. It makes me crazy.

People are you downvoting you, but it honestly was. The ISS does virtually nothing. Hardly any experiments of value are performed, and most of those that are could be performed on earth for a fraction of the cost. It has no potential value beyond the possibility of sending it to an asteroid or something. The SSC on the other hand might have found the Higgs years ago.

That's nonsense. There's a huge amount of science done on the ISS that would be hard or impossible to do on Earth, especially that involving how life reacts to conditions in space.

Cool as finding the Higgs boson is, it is hard to come up with any scenario where finding it is essential to humanity, whereas it is hard to come up with a scenario where understanding space and how to live and work there is NOT essential to humanity.

These kinds of projects have residual effects if not direct effects. Your governments interest in science and willingness to pay for projects like this will tend to attract the brightest scientific minds to participate. Those minds wont sit idle when that project is idle, either. This attraction tends to be sticky, meaning a bulk of the talent attracted by grand projects like this will tend to stay in the country, moving from that project to other projects within the country through contacts they made in the initial project. This means a sticky attraction of bright minds that will flow into other projects in your country, and an enriching of the brain-trust of your society.

It's like subsidizing education. On paper it's a net loss, but doing so has been shown to elevate the entire populations wages as skilled employment rises.

Problems which can only be solved through huge science/engineering projects, force you to come up with a lot of ingenuity/discoveries along the way. It's comparable to space exploration in that regard (see particle physics spin-offs and NASA spin-offs)

Channeling a person's curiosity about the world and it's inner workings just inspires a person in ways, that go beyond the motivation some random problem or a paycheck can provide. I'm not sure if you would even get as many developments, if you just spend the same amount of money on directly applicable research.

The same could've been thought when people were initially doing radiation studies. What will companies do with radiation? What products will be sold using it?

We don't know yet - but the usage of the research will come only when the research itself is performed. Further, the important technical breakthroughs in development of the facility to perform the experiments is sometimes the important part. Research into new superconductors, new supercapacitors, and other technical achievements are "secondary" to the research performed, but are integral developments for real world technology.

No, but our benefit becomes much greater. Read about how the researchers who developed the transistors spread out and formed most of the large semi-conductor companies in the valley (including fairchild, intel, basically all of them).

Worth so much more than the cost, because skills are valued based on rarity.

It really does, actually. Getting in on the ground floor of a research project builds the necessary skill and knowledge base to take full advantage of any applications. Otherwise, at best, you're just playing catch up.

Not to mention any number of countries interested in doing research with the SSC could have either bought time on the machines or "rented" the facilities for a period of time. That wouldn't be chump change and it would have been money brought to the US. Hell the U.S. has put in the hundreds of millions towards LHC since the late 90s.

Basic research comes before application (products). How will star trek-esque transporters and replicators be made? Basic research into the structure of the universe creates knowledge, then that knowledge is applied to create amazing new technology.

Your phone? The semiconductor physics used in the flash memory is based on the quantum tunneling effect which had to be measured very accurately to properly work. This isn't counting all the other damn things that come along with it (hard drives use GMR heads, which use a similar, but distinct effect).

All this tech came from somewhere, a lot of it from all the subsidies we put out to train a generation of engineers and scientists to build the bomb, and later all the computer technology the military needed for the cold war.

Imagine if you'd asked that question a hundred years ago. What exactly are we hoping to gain from current electricity, radio or semiconductors? The answer then would be the same as the answer now - no idea.

It's easy to point to big ones: No GPS without an understanding of relativity. No cell phones without an understanding of quantum electrodynamics.

But there's a lot more. Most research at universities is subsidized by the government, and would not be nearly as feasible without government money. The results of that research are then used in industry ALL THE TIME.

Well said. Theoretical discoveries may not have any immediate practical applications today, but 100 years down the road, when people are bitching about their teleporters taking more than 10 seconds to beam them from work to home, this discovery will make more sense.

I disagree with most of these answers. Sure, there have been technological offshoots from CERN and particle research, but that's nothing compared to those areas of physics that are actually geared towards providing a solution to an existing problem, along with blue sky research within these areas. However, fiscal benefit isn't how you should be thinking. We should never think of science in terms of useful and not useful science, rather we should think only of good and bad science. Science should always be pursued for the sake of discovering more and more about this universe, because that's the most exciting and worthwhile thing we can look toward as human beings.

This reflects well the impatience of our time. It might have taken thousands of year to improve on the hammer and a couple hundreds years to make a canon functional, now we bitch about a couple of years to prove a theoretical construct... ;)

Take stem cell research for example. That research was significantly held back in the US for roughly 10 years, but even so we are seeing great gains today from what research was done internationally and on a smaller scale in the US. Imagine how many lives could be saved or improved today, with another 10 years of knowledge, if George Bush hadn't blocked that early research...

The whole SSC project was amazing corrupt. It was fortunate it was cancelled when it was, otherwise it would have completely ruined the reputations of all involved. Sadly, no one ever dug deep and exposed what a fiasco it was.

They spent half the money to build part of it and the other half to destroy it; an utter waste of money. Luckily, Texas still has some accelerators of its own and still is conducting fantastic research. Also, the knowledge found still gets to be used by the scientific community all over the world so nothing is lost, really.

I had a professor that was, as I understand it, pretty far up in the chain of command for this project. Went pretty batshit insane when it was cancelled. Then again, I think he was always kind of a dick, and that was just the icing on the cake.

The fact a government can justify spending a trillion dollars on defense but balks at spending 8 percent of that figure on science makes me sick to my stomach. We have a long, long way to go as a species.

The LHC is a better project than the SSC ever was. It took over existing infrastructure to bring down costs and was funded by a multitude of sources instead of just the US plus minor external contributions. The LHC is a celebration of scientific collaboration that reaches beyond the political.

The guy had to take a break since his wife divorced him, he took it really hard supposedly. He apologizes to his fans which I don't think he should of sonce one person was sending him spam email since he stopped writing. But yes, its fucking awesome its back. I got the book too, but no signature sadly. Did you meet him?